The Second
Door: Everything is Alive

My parents'
approach to sex education at home was to read me
biology textbooks as bedtime stories. I learned all
about meiosis and mitosis, dominant and recessive
genes, and sperm and egg cells. I also picked up a
very scientific, reductionist perspective on the
nature of life. In our home, we didn't give much
credence to the idea of a soul or spirit animating
living beings, and looked back through time with a
smirk at the quaintness of ideas such as vitalism,
which holds that living beings contain some vital
essence beyond the simple material components of
their bodies.

When my
first child was born, I had quite a revelation. All
that biology hadn't really prepared for the reality
that a new person had come into being. Even
during the pregnancy, my mind had remained mostly
rooted in those biology textbooks. But when
I held my daughter in my arms and recognized
her as a personality, as an independent being
experiencing life for herself and already gifted
with an individual identity and inner nature, all
those biology lessons seemed to be missing the
point, somehow.

It's not
that the scientific explanations are incorrect, of
course. Rather, they seem to be missing some
crucial bit of perspective - in the same way that a
highway map doesn't prepare you for the experience
of driving in a lingering morning fog or catching
the smells drifting from the diner at the
intersection.

I've spent a
lot of time studying the philosophy of
consciousness. What does it mean to be aware, to
have experiences, to be conscious of your world? Is
this just some kind of complex behavior, a
fascinating but ultimately predictable outcome of
the physics and chemistry of biological systems? Or
is there always some important bit of perspective
that slips through your fingers when you try to
give a scientific account of how and why we are
conscious beings.

One "thought
experiment" that has always interested me - even
before I was old enough to read philosophy books -
is referred to as the qualia problem. We all
know what colors look like - blue, orange, green,
brown. Now how do I know what a blue sky looks like
to you? I don't; I only know what it
looks like to me. To you, it might look the way
orange does to me. But then, wouldn't we have
trouble communicating? No, because we learn
how to use color words by referring to objects that
have those colors. Your parents pointed out the
color of the sky and told you it was called "blue".
So now we both agree that the sky is blue. But are
we really having the same experience? We couldn't
even find out by asking you to paint the sky. You
would just reach for the color of paint that is the
same as the color of the sky - the paint we both
call blue.

The
philosophers who are confident that conscious
experience is just a consequence of the physics and
chemistry going on in our brains usually address
this kind of thought experiment by asserting that
there just can't be any sense to the notion that
someone else experiences blue with the same kind of
experience that I have for orange. Since there's no
way to test the difference, there just can't be any
real difference at all. Personally, though, I just
can't talk myself out of it that way. There is a
vivid difference between my experiences of the two
colors, and if I woke up tomorrow looking at an
orange sky and blue marigolds, there would be no
denying that something had changed.

The point of
this little excursion is to highlight the
difference between having a description or
explanation of something, and actually
experiencing it. Science does an amazing job
describing and explaining some of the details about
how human beings and other creatures function and
behave. It does this, though, by looking from the
outside, by observing cause and effect, by breaking
things up into their component parts and describing
how the parts interact. It bypasses the view from
inside, the actual experience we have as we do this
or that, or sense the world around us.

Thinking
about these sorts of questions drew me into
thinking about consciousness as something
qualitatively different from the functioning of our
brains and bodies, rather than as a consequence of
that functioning. The experiences we have, however
intimately connected with and supported by our
biological machinery, can't be entirely appreciated
or understood from a mechanical perspective. The
understanding must also take as a given the
self-evident reality of being a conscious,
experiencing being.

I got to
this perspective by way of some mental
machinations, as you can see, but it was all there
in the experience of recognizing the birth of my
daughter as the arrival of a person.

Having
learned to see consciousness as a basic ingredient
of the way things are, rather than a particular
phenomenon that happens in our brains, a door was
opened on a truly transforming
vista: Everything is alive.